Torreya Guardians is a self-organized group of naturalists, botanists, ecologists, and others with a deep concern for biodiversity protection, who have chosen to use the internet as a tool for discussing ideas, posting plans, and taking a variety of actions in behalf of our most endangered conifer tree: Torreya taxifolia.

There are no by-laws, officers, board, staff, overhead costs, dues, formal organizational structure, or physical location to this organization.

Torreya Guardians does not speak or take action as a group, but instead encourages subsets of those involved to post ideas and initiatives on this website and to help establish links with synergistic organizations and websites.

LEFT: Seeds of Torreya taxifolia donated to Torreya Guardians by the Biltmore Gardens (Asheville NC) in fall 2005, for first distribution in service of "rewilding" T. tax in the spring of 2006.

RIGHT: Lee Barnes with a seedling "rewilded" to Waynesville, North Carolina, in 2008 from its "peak glacial refuge" in northern Florida.

"The well-known case of the Torreya Guardians that have translocated seedlings of Torreya taxifolia
to more northerly latitudes in North America represents an independent citizen action
of very involved and proactive people."

"One amateur group, the Torreya Guardians, are attempting to 'rewild' the endangered Florida torreya, a conifer tree. Native only to a 65-kilometer length of the Apalachicola River, it began to decline in the 1950s, probably because of fungal pathogens, and is thought to be 'left behind' in a habitat hole that has prevented its migration northward. A few dozen seedlings were planted on private land near Waynesville, N.C., last July, with more expected."

"The first climate-driven relocation project was carried out by the community of self-organized ecologists, the Torreya Guardians, in the southeast of the United States. Their aim was to help conserve Torreya taxifolia, an endangered coniferous tree."

"It took action by a non-government organisation to re-awaken a debate on translocation for climate change mitigation. In the mid 2000s, the Torreya Guardians, a special interest group, formed to save the Florida torreya tree from extinction, and they embarked on a project to deliberately expand the range of the torreya more than 500 km northwards. The endangered conifer persisted in a single population of fewer than 1000 trees within a Pleistocene refuge in Florida. Climate change was predicted to reduce, or even eliminate, their habitat in this native range. The acquisition of torreya seeds and their planting in new areas was done legally, making this early and successful instance of assisted colonisation relatively straight-forward (McLachlan et al., 2007), at least from the Torreya Guardians' point of view."

"Lee Barnes, the de facto lieutenant of the Torreya Guardians, is eager to talk Torreya. 'I'm a horticulturist,' he says. 'I'm a professional tinkerer.' Barnes, who is no stranger to T. taxifolia  he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the cultivation of the Florida torreya and two other endangered Florida species in the 1980s  has so far collected and distributed about 120 seeds to about a dozen people and gardens north of Georgia, including amateur gardeners in Ohio, New York, England, Switzerland, and elsewhere."

"In 2005, as part of a 'no-budget, self-organizing, completely volunteer and paperwork-free recovery plan' for the Florida torreya, Barlow recruited Lee Barnes to launch a grassroots seed-distribution project. Taking seeds or plants from the wild and moving them across state lines without a permit would have been illegal, so the Torreya Guardians began by distributing seeds donated by a public garden in North Carolina, where a grove of Florida torreyas planted 70 years ago has been thriving and reproducing.... Undaunted, Barlow, armed with a website and an email list, has managed to advance a new conservation paradigm. The website she launched, www.torreyaguardians.org, has provided a forum for both citizens and scientists interested in debating the efficacy and ethics of assisted migration for critically imperiled species like the Florida torreya. In fact, many of the guidelines now being discussed in various scientific forums originated on this website."

"The focus of the Torreya Guardians is an 'assisted
migration' program that would introduce seedlings to
forests across the Southern Appalachians and Cumberland
Plateau (http://www.TorreyaGuardians.org). Their
intent is to avert extinction by deliberately expanding
the range of this endangered plant over 500 km northward.
Because planting endangered plants in new environments
is relatively simple as long as seeds are legally
acquired and planted with landowner permission, the
Torreya Guardians believe their efforts are justified. Introducing
this species to regions where it has not existed
for 65 million years is '[e]asy, legal, and cheap' (Barlow
& Martin 2004)."

EXCERPT: Along the banks of the Apalachicola river, near the border between Florida and Georgia, lives a rare tree called a stinking cedar. Once common, Torreya taxifolia seems to have got stuck in this tiny pocket as the continent warmed after the last ice age. It cannot migrate northward because the surrounding soils are too poor. Attacked by fungi, just a few hundred stinking cedars remain along the river. Rising temperatures now threaten to kill them off entirely.
Spying a looming extinction, a group of people is engaged in a kind of ecological vigilantism. The self-styled "Torreya Guardians" collect thousands of seeds a year and plant them in likely places across the eastern United States. Stinking cedar turns out to thrive in North Carolina. The Torreya Guardians are now trying to plant it in colder states like Ohio and Michigan as well. By the time the trees are fully grown, they reason, temperatures might be ideal there.
Some are dubious. The Torreya Guardians were at first seen as "eco-terrorists spreading an invasive species", remembers Connie Barlow, the group's chief propagandist. She rejects that charge, pointing out that she is only moving the tree within America. She also thinks that drastic action of this kind will soon be widespread: "We are the radical edge of what is going to become a mainstream action."

In 2015, Kara Rogers published a book (left) that includes a detailed chapter on Florida Torreya (University of Arizona Press). The end of that chapter highlights the work of TORREYA GUARDIANS. Access sample excerpts here.

Lee Barnes is a founding Torreya Guardian, with the longest tenure of work with Torreya taxifolia. From 1981-85 his graduate research entailed advanced propagation techniques for three endangered plants in Torreya State Park of Florida  Torreya among them. Here Lee speaks of his research, his early role in securing Torreya seeds for distribution to volunteer planters, and his broader frame of biodiversity-centric life work. Lee confirms that North Carolina is excellent habitat for this Florida species  and that it is crucial to experiment with plantings much farther north as climate continues to change. Click for Lee Barnes' PhD thesis re Torreya.

Connie Barlow presents 15 years of baseline photos and videos she recorded of Torreya taxifolia and Taxus floridana in their historically native range in Torreya State Park in northern Florida. Photos of spectacular California Torreya trees, recorded by Barlow in 2005, show the potential for Florida Torreya recovery efforts to strive for. Fred Bess shows (in 2014 video) 2 Asian conifers (Cephalotaxus and Cunninghamia) used in landscaping that are Torreya look-alikes. Paleoecological evidence that Florida's Torreya was "left behind" in its peak glacial refuge supports "assisted migration" actions. (Note: This is episode 17 in an ongoing VIDEO series of Torreya Guardians actions.)

Although our "assisted migration" actions and advocacy were initiated by Connie Barlow, who drew from a paleoecological perspective to surmise that Torreya taxifolia was one of our continent's "Pleistocene relict conifers", suffering from climate change in its historically native range (and therefore deserved to be assisted northward to more suitable habitats), not all volunteers are participating for the same reason. Connie was moved to act precisely because the official management plan for this endangered species, even as updated in 2010, did not authorize participating scientists to begin assisted migration experiments. Access in pdf Connie's 2010 comments to USF&WS.

p. 18 "Foster a working partnership between the Torreya Guardians, the Service, and other interested parties to help direct their managed relocation efforts."

p. 5 [listed within "Recovery Action 1: Protect existing habitat"] The Torreya guardians, created in 2004, translocated seedlings of T. taxifolia outside of the species native habitat (two sites in North Carolina mountains). One of the identified goals of their intentional assisted migration was to save T. taxifolia from extinction (http://www.torreyaguardians.org/save.html).

p. 9 [listed within "Recovery Action 5: Establish experimental collections of torreya outside its native habitat"] "In 1939 nearly a dozen specimens of T. taxifolia were planted at the Biltmore Gardens; 31 seedlings were planted in 2008 at two locations near Waynesville; and 10 seedlings were planted at Bt. Highlands and Franklin (http://www.torreyaguardians.org/north-carolina.html)."

Another aspect of our diversity: While evidence indicates that the mountains of North Carolina offer suitable habitat today, not everyone in the group would support the efforts by some of us in even more northern states, where we are planting Torreya seeds and seedlings in order to ascertain whether the species can survive even colder climates  and in anticipation of continued warming this century.

Our first action was to process and distribute about 300 seeds donated by Biltmore Gardens (North Carolina) in 2004 and 2005. Visible success began in summer 2008, when we planted 31 seedlings into semi-wild forest near Waynesville NC. All of these actions were in support of "species rescue." Since then, our choices in planting, hypotheses testing, and citizen science contributions entail at least these six topical concerns:

Species rescue (beyond the geographically limited official efforts under the U.S. Endangered Species Act)

The rest of this webpage has been unaltered since 2008in order to preserve the original roster of volunteers and advisors. Many additional volunteers have since stepped forward to help propagate and plant Torreya taxifolia. Consult the state-by-state pages accessed from our homepage to learn where and by whom propagation is occurring.

PARTICIPATING SCHOOLGROUNDS PROPAGATION: Bruce Rinker, chair of the science dept at North Cross School, a private school in Roanoke Valley, Virginia, began preparations for his students and school to participate in T. taxifolia assisted migration experiments and study in autumn 2009.

Editor's Note: An inability to reach consensus (among the above list of communicators) on the next step for Torreya taxifolia action, led Connie Barlow and Paul S. Martin to draft an advocacy piece for the final issue of Wild Earth magazine, and for Mark Schwartz to submit a rebuttal. Access both papers of the Winter 2004/2005 issue Wild Earth Forum: "Assisted Migration for an Endangered Tree". At the same time, Barlow and Martin published a set of proposed Standards for Assisted Migration on this website.